Salem's Lot

Review by Mike Finkelstein

Stephen King is acknowledged as one of the great masters of modern horror. Not only has his output been incredibly steady (at least one book a year most years, if not more) but he has a remarkably diverse catalog of stories spanning all kinds of horror. He’s not an author that can be easily pinned down for a kind story he likes to tell, instead going wherever his creativity takes him. He’s good at mining the interesting moments of small town life, juxtaposing them against deep, unimaginable horrors that shouldn’t exist. And he does it again and again.

Against that creativity and ability to find great depths of horror, Hollywood has always seemed to come up flat. Sure, some Stephen King adaptations are fantastic, such as The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Apt Pupil, but those films aren’t really horror (the closest of the three being Apt Pupil, but even that is more of a dramatic thriller). When it comes to actual horror, more often than not Hollywood completely fails to understand how to adapt King and crank out a good work. And Salem’s Lot from 1979 is no exception.

Written by Paul Monash (a writer who primarily worked in TV) and directed by Tobe Hooper (director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Salem’s Lot is a depressingly bad adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name. Where that book found ways to mine horror from the concept of a vampire coven rising in the middle of a small town, how a life where you know everyone and doors are always kept open for your neighbors can become a nightmare when everyone is invited in everywhere, the TV miniseries fails to find any of that horror, or even find the magic of small town life. 1979’s Salem’s Lot feels cheap, simple, and derivative but never, at any point, interesting.

Ben Mears (David Soul) is a writer who, years before, lived in the Maine town of Salem’s Lot. He moved away as a boy but has come back to make the town, and the scary mansion at the center of it, the subject of his third book. The Marsden House, as the mansion is known, was the site of a few different murders and Ben thinks the house is a central point of evil, a nexus that draws bad people in and encourages their bad deeds. At least, that’s what he’s going to write in his book, which may or may not be fictional.

However, while back in town, Ben meets Susan Norton (Bonnie Bedelia), and the two hit it off. But as they hang out and get to know each other, they both start spotting weird things going on in town. People are getting sick, some are mysteriously dying, and no one can explain what’s going on. Susan’s father Bill (Ed Flanders), who is also the town doctor, has some theories, but Ben, alongside his old teacher, Jason Burke (Lew Ayres), has one really crazy theory: vampires. Except, as more people die and others disappear, the theory starts to seem less and less crazy. And everything started when a Mr. Straker (James Mason) bought the Marsden House for himself and a mysterious Mr. Barlow (Reggie Nalder). Ben is going to have to find a way to stop the spread of these monsters before it’s too late for the town and everyone in it.

To its credit, Salem’s Lot does try. I think deep down the production team, Hooper included, wanted to make a miniseries that tapped into the Hammer Films vibe of the era. Hammer had made a solid series of vampire horror films, dating all the way back to 1959’s Dracula, and this miniseries certainly wants to have that same style. Dramatic sets, creepy vampire effects, and some great, moody vibes all feature in a few of the most affecting scenes. In those moments, you get how Salem’s Lot could have been a successful production.

Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between. For the most part, 1979’s Salem’s Lot is a long, boring, tedious slog. It spends so long getting all of its pieces in place, forcing you to meet a ton of characters over the course of its opening episode, when very few of them matter and none of their stories go anywhere. Do we need to learn about the middle school pageant? Or about the failed marriage between the woman renting a room to Ben Mears and one of her long-term tenants? Do we have to know that the real estate agent in town is sleeping with his secretary when, after the halfway point, none of them show up again? No, we don’t, but we spend so long getting to that point you end up wondering why we even bothered.

There is so much of this in the first half of the miniseries, and it feels like all of this was put in to get the miniseries up to a three hour length. A lot of this material was in the original book, but there it mattered because the characters continued through the book and were, in various ways, pivotal to the spread of vampirism throughout the town. But the miniseries drops so many characters and their plotlines once we switch to the second episode (likely because the actors were only contracted to appear in the first half) that it makes all their stories irrelevant. It’s just a lot of padding that goes nowhere in the long term, all of which could have been cut.

In fact, I honestly think this version could have just been a film and it wouldn’t have lost anything of importance. A two-hour TV movie event would have better suited what this film was doing since it’s pretty clear the team was struggling to flesh out the full two-episode runtime. All the small town drama, all the things that made King’s story feel alive, dies here when put on the screen. It doesn’t add drama or life or interest, it all just falls flat. Removing that and getting us to the vampires faster would help the production a lot.

Not that the vampire bits are really that great. I wouldn’t call anything Hooper is able to do here at all scary. It feels like watered down Hammer material, likely because the network censors wouldn’t let the team be scarier, gorier, or more dramatic. It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy of better work, distilled and sanitized and left to lose all that made it interesting. There are effective moments, like when vampires are floating outside of windows, or when the master vampire appears on screen in all his glory, but these moments aren’t enough to carry the film, and they certainly don’t qualify as real horror.

And it’s a pity because there’s real potential in this story for good horror. A plague spreading throughout a town, the neighborly connections feeding it. Then the town starts to die and the people within it can’t understand why. There’s tension that can be mined there, and that tension can build to real horror. Salem’s Lot never finds that tension failing to create anything better than an After School Special vibe. It wants so hard to be horror but the limitations of 1970s broadcast TV couldn’t let it be more.

In the end, that leaves 1979’s Salem’s Lot as, at best, a noble failure. It tries, it clearly does, but nothing within the miniseries builds to anything resembling a good time. It’s a vampire film with all the blood drained out, a husk of what could have been a really good work of horror.